The Fetal Position
by SewerUrchin
Summary: A shortfic about Henry's departure and how Betty deals. DB friendship.


**Disclaimer: I don't own Ugly Betty or any of the characters or brandnames mentioned, and I'm surely not making any money off of this.**

**Hello, all. I know, I know, I have fics I haven't even completed yet, but ideas keep bouncing around in my head. It's B/D friendship...of course. Enjoy and please, please review!**

Betty was doubled over on the bed, her prime view of the spackled ceiling blurred by her tears. She wondered, ridiculously, why such a ritzy-titsy hotel as the Grand Regent would have spackled ceilings with multi-colored glittering flecks, for Christ's sake. Pondering over her room's dubious décor was worlds better than pondering over what had actually happened exactly, oh, two hours, forty-six minutes and three seconds ago. Make that four seconds. Because that was when she'd said goodbye to one Henry Grubstick, accountant extraordinaire, wearer of Coke-bottle glasses and owner of a surprisingly (and disturbingly) ripped bod, and knocker-upper and future baby-daddy to evil redheaded two-faced little wench-hos named Charlie, but oh, no, not bitter in the least over here…

**_flashback_**

"I hope you have a wonderful life," Henry said, taking her face in his hands.

Betty gently pulled away. "Deja-vu, thou art a bitch," she'd laughed gently yet humorlessly. Whenever she'd allowed herself to think of this ever-impending moment in the past, she'd imagined she would just die, just melt into a puddle of useless nothingness and become one with the chewing gum stuck to the airport parking lot pavement. Now that the moment was here, she didn't, though. Engulfed by sadness, yes, _and Lord Jesus God on high, the pain_, but she was still vertical. She was rather proud of herself.

Henry, always compelled to make things right, no matter how comically hopeless and futile the circumstances (they were alike that way, Daniel had pointed out once, a strange sadness in his eyes), started to speak, but she put a finger to his lips to silence him.

"You've given me the best five months of my life, baby. Go on, now, be there for your child. If it's a boy, I hope he looks like you, 'cause you're one handsome joker." She said the next words with a conviction that she felt down to the marrow of her bones, the essence of her being. "This hurts, but it hurts because it's right. The world is just as it should be."

They'd embraced then because Betty wouldn't allow a kiss. A kiss wouldn't have rung true, she admitted to herself in the final moments of the saga that was Betty/Henry. It wouldn't have rung true because even though the sex was fabulous up until the bitter (_not_ _bitter, no sir_) end, they had evolved into being more good friends than anything, holding on to a relationship that she'd outgrown and he'd already mentally abandoned for Tucson and his child out of a weird combo of love and obligation and an inability to just end the thrice-cursed thing, already. To have called them friends with benefits sounded cheap, he was more to her than that, but he wasn't her soul mate, he wasn't even her best friend, and both those titles were reserved hands down for one man and one man only.

So he left, and Betty had never felt more heartbroken and more relieved at the same time. All this conflicting emotions crap (_stupid psyche!_) was giving her a massive headache. She checked into the Grand Regent (pricey as all hell, but for once she didn't give a single damn) because 1) she needed to sleep, pee, gorge herself on cake, and call Daniel, not necessarily in that order, and 2) she couldn't do those things at home under her beloved family's sympathetic, pitying stares. God knows Hilda had probably whipped out the phone book and was trying to pimp her out already.

Betty had flopped down on the bed and cried then at the whole effed-up situation, more from losing the idea of Henry than Henry himself, and once she'd realized this disloyalty in her heart, it only made her sob harder and feel like a fickle bitch, or at the very least a child who didn't know what the hell she even wanted in or from a man.

**_/flashback_**

_Oh, but I know exactly where I stand with one man_, and with the thought of Daniel Meade, she whipped out her cell with the frenzy of Marc when she did something particularly mortifying at work that he wanted to show Amanda later. Betty tried to stifle her sobs so she wouldn't scare the ever-loving crap out of him, to no avail.

He answered abruptly. "Wha--?"

Okay, so he was sleepy or drunk, both of which he'd have to get over right now because she needed him, dammit.

Betty tried to gather her thoughts to formulate an explanation that would make sense, but she was pretty sure all he could hear were sobs.

"Betty, is that you?" Off her whimper that must have somewhat resembled an affirmative response, Daniel started firing off questions in that pissed-sounding, cut-like-a-knife voice that Betty knew he only used when he was having the living shit scared out of him.

"Henry," was all she could manage to gasp out. She knew she really should have offered up more of an explanation than that because she could practically hear Daniel's head imploding on the other end of the line. She knew Daniel had been itching for an excuse to either fire Henry without incurring a wrongful termination suit, or kick Henry's ass up and down Times Square ever since he'd left her the first time. Physical combat wasn't really Daniel's style unless he was wrestling with Becks, and since Henry had left for Tucson, firing him was a moot point, so she felt her erstwhile boyfriend was fairly safe when it came to the Wrath of Over-Protective Best Friend.

"Henry's gone and I'm at the Grand Regent and I _need_ you, Daniel," she managed, interrupting Daniel, who was in the middle of demanding "What did he touch?," which was always, weirdly, the first thing he asked whenever she called him from being out with a guy, whether business or boyfriend-related.

She hung up, cutting off Daniel's asking "Betty, are you hur…?," sat down tenderly on the edge of the bed, and felt slightly less than dead. Only maimed, maybe, yeah, that was a good diagnosis of her condition. After all, her lifeline was on his way.

Betty heard a pounding on her door about fifteen minutes later. She opened the door without even looking through the peephole; only Daniel Meade could make a knock on a door sound that exasperated and worried for her. She could tell he was gearing up to really let her have it, so she tried humor.

"Well, it took you long enough. What if I'd swallowed a bottle of pills or something?" she teased weakly, hoping to evoke fond memories of a not-so-long-ago shitty Thanksgiving, of picking out a purple shirt which did a hell of a lot of good, as it had turned out.

Daniel was not in the mood for a trip down memory lane. His blue eyes were so cold that for a moment Betty thought that maybe he was just pissed at having been woken up, or interrupted mid-orgasm, or whatever or whoever the hell he'd been doing when she called him. With Daniel, you could usually narrow it down to one or two things. She found herself being pulled into his embrace, a little too tight to be totally enjoyable, but comforting in a masochistic way, Betty supposed.

And now for the lecture. "So, I receive a call at three in the morning from someone wailing like banshee giving birth, and I think to myself, _Daniel, this is one of those obscene calls I get and in a minute they'll start telling me how they can't live without me…_" Betty rolled her eyes from where she was currently squished against his chest; he was endearingly egotistic even at the most tense of times. Normally, she would've called him out on it in a hot second, but he seemed to be on a stress-and-fear-induced roll, so she let it slide for now. "…and then it turns out to be you, and you HANG UP ON ME, for Christ's sake, before I can suss out if you're hurt or bleeding or suicidal or WHATEVER, and I come flying down here like a bat out of hell, knocking over old ladies, and shit, I think I even steamrollered BETTY WHITE, just to open the door and have you making tasteless jokes about PILLS…"

"Well, what did you want me to say?" wheezed Betty, finally feeling she needed to step in and defend herself. "I'm curled up under the bed in the fetal position, wish you were here?"

Daniel leaned down (way down) and touched her forehead to hers, breathing heavy from his mondo-monologue-guilt-trip, and traced a tear-track on her face with a gentle finger. Betty watered up again, and Daniel, disturbingly, looked like he might be, too. She'd learned that Daniel Meade was never more stressed or at a loss than when, she, Betty Suarez, started to cry. He could stand anyone's tears but hers, she'd discovered, from day one.

"Alright, the only rule here tonight is this," Betty said. "No saying 'I told you so' with regards to Henry. I mean it. Oh, and there's cake."

Daniel's eyes never left hers; he was studying her in his customary way that would've unnerved her coming from most people, but it was kind of flattering from Daniel. He had that small smile on, the one that accompanied the look; like his Betty's-tears-equal-kryptonite issue, this smile, too, had existed from day one. It was puzzled, charmed, and amused at the same time, like he was ever so happy to be there with her, but he still wasn't convinced after all this time that she wasn't just some quirky figment of his imagination.

Finally, he spoke. "You mentioned cake?"

Betty grinned despite everything, took him by the hand, and pulled him into the room.

**On your mark, get set, review…please.**


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